Inside Unmanned Systems

APR-MAY 2018

Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.

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10 April/May 2018 unmanned systems
inside
ended up becoming the most famous
Air Force aircraft a few months into
the Global War on Terror. Air Force
budgets ref lected this switch. In the
mid 2000s, Air National Guard units
started converting from fighters and
transport units into drone squadrons.
The Air Force trained more drone
pilots than bomber and f ighter pi-
lots combined starting in 2010 and
hasn't let up since. In 2012, a single
drone squadron at Creech Air Force
Base f lew more hours annually than
the entire Pacific Air Force. The Navy
watched this conversion from manned
to unmanned aviation in the Air Force,
which was relatively safe because there
wasn't a drone capable of surviving the
rigors of carrier aviation. Yet.
After NATO's air campaign in Libya
in 2011, the Navy came under pressure
from the Secretary of Defense to develop
a carrier-based strike drone. Air Force
Predators had to fly 10 hour round trips
from NATO land bases, leaving a little
over half their fuel for the actual mis-
sion. A Navy carrier drone could have
performed the missions from minutes
offshore versus hours.
However, instead of rushing a car-
rier drone into production, naval avia-
tion took its time. I'm convinced they
did so to allow the pressure to die
down from simultaneous operations in
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa
and Libya to prevent a carrier drone
from competing with the naval variant
of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The entire Nav y isn't unmanned
adverse, however. The Navy's carrier
aviation experts might be drone doubt-
ers but the opposite is true of the oldest
warfare community in the Navy—their
surface warriors. The Navy's frigate,
destroyer and cruiser commanders
have been early adopters of drone tech-
nology. Even though the U.S. Air Force
had watched the Israeli Pioneer drone
shred Syria's air defenses in the Bekaa
Valley Campaign, the first American
users of the Pioneer drone weren't in
the U.S. Air Force. The first American
Pioneers f lew with the Navy's surface
warriors off the battleship USS Iowa
in 1986 and they're still f lying with the
Navy and Marines. The surface war-
fare follow-up to the Pioneer was with
Northop Grumman's unmanned Fire
Scout helicopter in 2000 and Insitu's
Scan Eagle in 2005. From the late
1980s until today, the leaders in na-
val unmanned aviation have been the
Navy's Surface Warriors, not her Naval
Aviators.
FIGHTING FOR INNOVATION
The Army and Air Force experienced
something similar, but with their large in-
telligence communities as leading drone
advocates versus their combat arms
or aviation communities. The Army's
Military Intelligence (MI) Corps have
enthusiastically supported drones since
the late 1970s with their Aquila program.
The Army was the second service to fly
the Pioneer and I had Pioneers in the MI
Brigade I was attached to during Desert
Storm in 1991. The famous Predator itself
started out as an Army advanced con-
cept, technology development project in
the mid 1990s before the Air Force took
it over. The Army has drone systems in all
levels of combat command, down to the
platoon level in some units.
Supported by some innovative fight-
er generals, the Air Force intelligence,
THE FOLKS YOU THINK WOULD BEST SEE THE ADVANTAGES OF UNMANNED
AVIATION—THE AVIATORS—ARE OFTEN THE TOUGHEST SELL.
MAJOR GENERAL JAMES O. POSS (RET)
is a leading expert on UAS, having targeted
the first armed UAS strikes, designed the U.S.
Air Force's remote split operations system
for UAS control, and designed the Distributed
Common Ground Station for UAS intelligence
analysis. General Poss was the Executive
Director of the Alliance for System Safety of
UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE)
of the Federal Aviation Administration's
(FAA) Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)
Center of Excellence Team. He is CEO of ISR
Ideas—an intelligence, unmanned systems
and cyber warfare consulting company
with decades of intelligence community
experience, coupled with insider FAA
knowledge.
General Overview by James Poss, Maj Gen (RET) USAF